The Countercoup and the Trials After

Back in August, I wrote:

Historically, it is not the government or elected officials that have resisted the various attempts, some successful, some not, to turn the US government into an authoritarian aristocratic state; it is the people. Republicanism, in the original sense of the word, runs deep in the US public. The Vietnam war was not ended by the federal bureaucracy or Congress; it was a popular movement that ended it. The prosecutions Maddow describes in Ultra failed, but it was reported and the public voted out the Nazi collaborators in Congress. Union veterans were the strongest opponents of compromises with the racists of the South. And now the major opposition to Trump and the neo-fascist Republican Party is not elected officials or federal bureaucrats; it is a broad public coalition.

Planning for Victory

Liberals must begin planning for victory. If, as seems likely, our side wins the next election, we will have won a battle, not the war. Many problems will remain that will not be easily resolved.

The Flapping of Angry Butterfly Wings, Oct 24

Various short remarks I posted on Bluesky.

The Age of the Crackpot

“When Man ceases to worship God, he does not worship nothing, but instead worships everything.”–attributed to Chesterton

The failure of authority, and not only religious authority, has left people vulnerable to all manner of woo. One may reasonably reject authority but one must not then replace it with superstition.

The Unfree Press

We have an odd sort of unfree press in the USA. People can, within broad limits, publish just about anything, but getting a wide audience? There are four major book publishers and a handful of mass media conglomerates, all with right-wing to far right ownership. What gets wide distribution is circumscribed, and much of what is published is vacuous. Even before “AI,” public discourse was full of blither. People are desperate for anything real to hang on to, and if they can’t find anything real, they’ll hang on to anything, even crazy things. The damaged US educational system doesn’t help, either; people need tools that will let them distinguish truth from falsehood, and the educational system doesn’t mostly give them those tools.

Harry Potter and the Bones of Empire

Two days ago “Big names in AI and Silicon Valley tech announced yesterday that they’re launching a boarding academy for 16 to 22 year olds.” (Faine Greenwood) And I commented, “This is a kind of modernized version of the English boarding school and those were actually pretty horrible. I mean, it’s fun to read boarding schools stories but think about what it was like to live them out! […] My spouse has an absolutely scathing critique of [the Harry Potter] books. I think I’m going to ask them to tell me again and write it out as a blog post!”

And I did, I interviewed them, and here is the result.

The Flapping of Angry Butterfly Wings, August 14, 2026

Wrote these exceptionally angry Bluesky posts over the past few days

• We seem to be suffering—the world seems to be suffering—a moral apocalypse. USAID cuts. Slavery in China. Genocide in Sudan. Environmental destruction. The list goes on and on. The wealthiest tech CEOs—Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Zuck—as well as many lesser figures are moral voids.